How To Be Popular on Twitter – the science behind getting RTed

Viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella studied around 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets to discover what’s popular and what’s not. He’s written up an interesting report, called the Science of Retweets, but here are the top tips about RTs that we’ve learnt from his research for twitter:

THE GUIDE TO RETWEETING – Event Marketing

1) Sometimes asking for a RT won’t do any harm. Words and phrases such as “RT” or “Please RT” are among the most popular overall
2) Although talking about what you’re eating for breakfast or that you’re about to go to bed won’t interest anyone.
3) Between 7 and 9pm is the most popular time to get RTed on Twitter if you’re in the UK
4) Should you save your most important tweets for Thursday or Friday – because these are the most popular days
5) Using bit.ly could give you more chance of being RTed – although this probably just means that most people on Twitter are using bit.ly
6) Breaking up your tweet with punctuation, such as a colon, will appre but using too many won’t win you any friend